The Mayan Mystery is a retro-inspired metroidvania with an emphasis on exploration. You play as Mitch, and with the help of your best friend (Otis) and mentor (Dr.A), must stop Horatio Hawk from escaping the Mayan temple with a magical artifact!
This is the first in a series of games that will take the Adventures Apes from one location to the next, one era to the next, all in an effort to keep the world's most precious treasures out of Horatio's hands!
The full version one the Adventure Apes Webpage has 5 bosses and more than 100 rooms plus an illustrated instruction booklet! :)

I can't see why this game has such a low rating. It does get quite difficult, maybe they weren't expecting a challenge.

I usually steer WAY clear of Game Maker games, because they basically all feel exactly the same. The dev made a very respectable game here, I am a huge fan of platformers and usually quite critical in my judgement.

It's not going in the history books so to speak, but at the price I would for sure recommend purchasing for some platforming goodness..

I found this to be a fun little platformer. The graphics are nice and the sounds (weapons and music) have a nice 8-bit vibe without feeling dated.

The keyboard controls are okay, nut not great. Sometimes the response to multi-key operations like running and jumping seems to be just a bit off or late. As a result, it does take a bit to get the a feel for the jumping, and I have yet to feel that I have it down 100%. Until you get a reasonable handle on this some things may frustrate you, particularly the vanishing platforms over spike pits. They are navigable though with some practice.

The way powers are awarded does cause some backtracking. Since once you get, say, the power to jump higher you'll need to backtrack to get any items you couldn't reach before and so on. Because of this, I always felt a bit lost in the maps, and was never quite sure where to go next.

Staying alive in most of the game is quite easy. The enemies respawn when you leave and re-enter an area. So you just have to find an enemy near one of the gold hawk doors/gates and go back and forth through the gate re-killing the same enemy for health and ammo if you get low.

The boss battles, however, are more of a challenge. You'll need to get a good handle on your jumping and shooting timing to beat them. This is standard platformer behavior, but with the controls in this game I did find the boss type battles to be maybe harder than they should be. The controls seemed to be fighting me as much as the boos was sometimes.

Even with the criticisms above, this is a fun platformer. The main character is cute and the animations are good. The enemies I've seen so far are all well done as well, and I like the art style. Well worth the download if you like platformers and are looking for some inexpensive fun on a rainy day.

great metroidvania-like with an original setting , made me nostalgia and it's family friendly too. I think the previous lower scores were mainly due to some flaws in the earlier versions that have since been patched.
I look forward to Scarypotato's next game